Book Summary: The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (Marcus Borg and N.T. Wright), HarperSanFrancisco, 1999.

[These were originally published in small bites on Usenet newsgroups: see the Google search of this site for each].

Borg’s theologically liberal, and Wright’s conservative, and they’re both Oxford graduates in theology highly acclaimed scholars.

They’ve studied the New Testament documents, especially the Gospels, and have come to radically different conclusions about who Jesus is/was and his miracles, the resurrection and a host of other significant beliefs. In this and the next few posts we’ll try to figure out why.

First, a couple of quotes from Marcus Borg:

‘As a Christian, I see Jesus as the messiah, the Son of God, the Word of God, the Wisdom/Sophia of God/ That affirmation is a defining element of what it means to be a Christian: namely, Christians find the decisive revelation or disclosure of God in Jesus. But I doubt that any of these affirmations go back to Jesus himself. I describe Jesus before Easter in nonmessianic terms. (p.54).

‘There are four options for thinking about the relationship between Jesus’ own self-awareness and his messianic status.

1. Jesus thought he was the messiah, and he was right.

2. Jesus thought he was the messiah, and he was wrong.

3. Jesus didn’t think he was the messiah, and therefore he wasn’t the messiah.

4. Whether or not Jesus thought he was the messiah, he is the messiah.

‘Of these options, I choose the fourth, and Tom chooses the first. We thus share an important agreement: Jesus is the Christian messiah. We disagree about a particular historical judgment, namely, whether we can be reasonably confident that a messianic self-understanding was part of Jesus’ own self awareness.’ (p. 55).

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The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (Marcus Borg and N T Wright) is a book after my own heart. I don’t agree with all that either writer suggests, but reading an irenic discussion between two outstanding scholars helps sharpen one’s own thinking. How pathetic to simply believe what someone told you when you were impressionable! This is one of the first books I would suggest an intelligent Christian study for Christology 101.

Borg’s liberal (but he calls liberal N T scholars ‘mainstream’), and Wright’s conservative (but he’s the only conservative I know who uses a small ‘g’ for God when it’s not a proper noun (as in god-ordained, Israel’s god etc.). Borg is more ‘heady’ – as you would expect from liberals (!); Wright’s more ‘pastoral’ – as you would expect from a bishop!

The first question many ask about Jesus is ‘Did he exist?’ Both of these scholar-historians assume he did: in fact I can’t remember them raising the question. But I’m re-reading the book for the third time and if I come across something in that area I’ll let you know!

Of course in terms of theology ‘there’s nothing new under the sun’. Take these two sentences for example, from Tom Wright: ‘The Pharisees were deeply critical of most of their contemporary Jews. The Essenes regarded all Jews except themselves as heading for judgment; they had transferred to themselves all the promises of vindication and salvation, while they heaped anathemas on everyone else, not least the Pharisees’ (p.43) (Reminds me of folks I meet every day on Usenet newsgroups

Wright goes on: ‘Jesus’ clash with the Pharisees came about not because he was an antinomian, or because he believed in justification by faith while they believed in justification by works, but because *his kingdom agenda for Israel demanded that Israel leave off its frantic and paranoid self-defense, reinforced as it now was by the ancestral codes, and embrace insterad the vocation to be the light of the world, the salt of the earth* (emphasis Wright’s, pp. 44-45).

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Note from Rowland: Continuing our summary/review of Tom Wright and Marcus Borg’s discussion… This book, by the way, won the “Best General Interest Book of 1999″ award from the Association of Theological Booksellers.

Tom Wright, the more conservative scholar, says of the Gospel records ‘This is close to what happened’. Marcus Borg: ‘It got embellished along the way.’

The essence of their differences has to do with historiography (the principles, theories, or methodology of scholarly historical research) and presuppositions. Historiography asks: ‘What really happened – then and since?’ Presuppositions have to do with the biases (everyone has them!) we bring to the discussion. Like: ‘Since the Enlightenment can we simply accept ancient miracle stories as supernatural events, or is there some other explanation?’

To anticipate one of my major concerns: what would a bishop living in Durham, England or a scholar who is ‘Distinguished Professor of Religion and Culture in the Philosophy Department at Oregon State University’ know about how traditional cultures – especially in this case Ancient Near Eastern cultures – transmit oral history and traditions? Have they spent any time in/with traditional cultures to find out? I have other concerns, but that’s my principal one.

Marcus Borg says ‘two statements about the nature of the gospels are crucial for grasping the historical task: (1) They are a developing tradition. (2) They are a mixture of history remembered and history metaphorized’ (p. 4). We’ll revisit these ideas later.

Borg discusses Jesus as ‘Jewish mystic and Christian messiah’ under five headings: Jesus as spirit person, healer, wisdom teacher, social prophet, and movement initiator. Because he does not believe the ‘pre-Easter Jesus’ thought of himself as the messiah, Borg’s preoccupation with Jesus is mainly in nonmessianic categories.

Borg writes that in the earliest gospel, Mark, there is only one occasion when Jesus-as-messiah comes up: in the famous interchange between Jesus and his disciples as Caesarea Philippi (Mark 6:45-52). Jesus asked ‘Who do you say that I am?’ Peter reported what others had been saying, ‘You are the messiah’. What follows is enigmatic: Jesus neither accepted nor rejected Peter’s affirmation, but instead sternly told them not to tell anyone else.

Matthew adds a second christological affirmation: ‘the son of the living God.’ Then Matthew has Jesus commending Peter and explicitly affirming Jesus’ own special status: ‘Blessed are you Simon… for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven’ (Matthew 16:16-17). Borg’s comment: ‘In my judgment, historical caution requires that we be skeptical that any of this goes back to Jesus’ (p. 57).

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Bishop Tom Wright (the conservative scholar) has a different approach to the Gospels-as-history than does Marcus Borg.

Sample:

‘The guild of New Testament studies has become so used to operating with a hermeneutic of suspicion that we find ourselves trapped in our own subtleties. If two ancient writers agree about something, that proves one got it from the other. If they seem to disagree, that proves that one or both are wrong. If they say an event fulfilled biblical prophecy, they made it up to look like that. If an event or saying fits a writer’s theological scheme, that writer invented it. If there are two accounts of similar events, they are a ‘doublet’ (there was only one event); but if a single account has anything odd about it, there must have been two events, which are now conflated. And so on….

‘But as any author who has watched his or her books being reviewed will know, such reconstructions again and again miss the point, often wildly. If we cannot get it right when we share a culture, a period, and a language, it is highly likely that many of our subtle reconstructions of ancient texts and histories are our own unhistorical fantasies…

‘Suspicion is all very well; there is also such a thing as a hermeneutic of paranoia. Somebody says something: they must have a motive; therefore thay must have made it up. Just because we are rightly determined to avoid of hermeneutic of credulity, that does not mean that there is no such thing as appropriate trust, or even readiness to suspend disbelief for a while…

‘I propose a no-holds-barred history on the one hand and a no-holds-barred faith on the other.’ (p. 18).

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Continuing our summary/review of Tom Wright and Marcus Borg’s discussion…

Today, some key insights from Marcus Borg:

‘Behind the picture of Jesus as healer and exorcist, I affirm a historical core. In common with the majority of contemporary Jesus scholars, I see the claim that Jesus performed paranormal healings and exorcisms as history remembered. Indeed, more healing stories are told about Jesus than about any other figure in the Jewish tradition. He must have been a remarkable healer…

‘[But] I do not accept a supernatural interventionist model of God and God’s relation to the world…

‘I also reject a common modern explanation of Jesus’ healings as psychosomatic… I do not need to know the explanatory mechanism in order to affirm that paranormal healings happen…

‘ Few scholars have made healing as central to Jesus as John Dominic Crossan, who argues that healing and a shared meal were the two central features of Jesus’ public activity…

‘In short, Jesus’ healing activity flowed out of and affirmed the immediacy of access to God.’ (pp. 66-68).

[Note from Rowland: these quotes are meant to be ‘teasers’. They can stand alone, but are best read within the context of the chapter/book].

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Tom Wright:

‘[My approach] opens itself to the full hermeneutical fury of the modernist, who says that I have renounced objectivity, and the postmodernist, who says it’s all wish fulfilment. Equally important, I open myself to the comment that plenty of people have used the word ‘Jesus’ to denote figures so different from one another that the possibility of self-delusion is strong. All this I acknowledge. Yet at precisely this point history comes to the help of faith. The Jesus I know in prayer, in the sacraments, in the faces of those in need, is the Jesus I meet in the historical evidence – including the New Testament, of course, but the New Testament read not so much as the church has told me to read it but as I read it with my historical consciousness fully operative. The Jesus whose love seems to go deeper and reach more of me than the deepest human loves I know… converges remarkably with the Jesus whom I have tried to describe historically… the Jesus, that is, who found himself possessed of a very first-century Jewish vocation, to go to the place where the world was in pain and to take that pain upon himself…

‘I see why some people find themselves driven to distinguish the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, but I do not think the early Christians made such a distinction, and I do not find the need to do so myself. This Jesus of whom I speak still comes to meet us, sometimes hidden, sometimes not, sometimes despite the locked doors of a closed epistemology, always recognizable by the mark of the nails…

‘History, then, prevents faith becoming fantasy. Faith prevents history becoming mere antiquarianism. Historical research, being always provisional, cannot ultimately veto faith, though it can pose hard questions that faith, in order to retain its integrity precisely as *Christian* faith, must struggle to answer, and may well grow strong through answering’ (pp. 26,27)…

Note from Rowland: You won’t find sentiments quite like these in the writings of the Jesus Seminar scholars… and therein lies an important clue…

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Marcus Borg:

‘Jesus a Jewish mystic became the Christian messiah. The Christian messiah was a Jewish mystic. Both statements are interesting and illuminating.

‘As a Jewish mystic, what did Jesus know? He knew how to heal. He knew how to create memorable sayings and stories; he had a metaphoric mind. He knew that God was accessible to the marginalized because he was from the marginalized himself. He knew that tradition and convention were not sacred in themselves but, at best, pointers to and mediators of the sacred and, at worst, a snare. He knew an oppressive and exploitative social order that legitimated itself in the name of God, and he knew this was not God’s will. And he knew all of this most foundationally because he knew God.’ (pp. 75-76).

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Tom Wright:

‘The coming of the Kingdom of God was about Israel’s story reaching its climax, about Israel’s history moving toward its decisive moment’ (p. 35)

‘The Jesus I have been describing was a first-century Jewish prophet announcing and inaugurating the Kingdom of God, summoning others to join him, warning of the consequences if they did not, doing all this in symbolic actions, *and indicating in symbolic actions, and in cryptic and coded sayings, that he believed he was Israel’s messiah, the one through whom the true God would accomplish his decisive purpose*’ (emphasis Wright’s, p. 50)

‘If Jesus’ death did accomplish the real defeat of the evil that had infected Israel along with the rest of the world – if, in other words his actions in Jerusalem did somehow accomplish the kingdom of God in the revised sense that he had been announcing all along – then this was good news not only for Israel but for the whole world.’ (p.51).

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Marcus Borg:

‘[There are at least five interpretations of Jesus’ death in the New Testament]. I see them as powerful and truthful post-Easter metaphors for expressing the significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

‘But for several reasons I do not think they go back to Jesus himself. First, with a majority of mainline scholars, I see the passion predictions in Mark as post-Easter creations… Traces in the gospels indicate that Jesus’ death was a shock to his followers and a shattering of their hopes. This is hard to understand if Jesus had spoken so clearly about his upcoming execution.

‘Second… I see the use of passages from the Hebrew Bible generally as prophecy historicized rather than prediction fulfilled.

‘Third, I have trouble imagining that Jesus saw his own death as salvific. Tom and I differ substantially on this… His claim… is that Jesus saw his own death as accomplishing something of utmost importance in the God-Israel relationship, as “the final battle against the real enemy”. Jesus took the suffering and sin of Israel…. upon himself. He saw his death as atoning for the sin of which Israel was guilty and he himself was innocent…

‘I think Tom’s claim is correct [in that] the notion of one’s death having an atoning effect for others was present in the Jewish milieu in which Jesus lived and died. I accept that it was possible for a first-century Jew to think this. But I have difficulty affirming that Jesus believed this about himself’ (p. 81)

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Tom Wright:

‘I suggest that early Christian atonement theology derives ultimately not simply from the fact of Jesus’ death together with an interpretation extraneously projected onto the event by the ingenious minds of early Christians, but from Jesus’ death seen, as he saw it himself, as the eschatological act whereby, in accordance with scriptural and postscriptural traditions, but making a new amalgamation of them, Israel’s God had dealt with the state of exile-because-of-sin in which Israel, and the whole world, had languished…’ (p. 104).

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Marcus Borg:

‘Why was Jesus killed? Why did it happen? What’s the relationship between Jesus’ life and his execution? … I see the understanding of his death as salvific as a post-Easter interpretation generated within the early Christian community, not as the intention of Jesus himself…

‘Why then was he killed? For me, the most persuasive answer is his role as a social prophet who challenged the domination system in the name of God. To make the same point differently, if Jesus had been only a mystic, healer, and wisdom teacher, I doubt that he would have been executed. But he was also a God-intoxicated voice of religious social protest who had attracted a following…

‘To make the point yet one more way, Jesus died as a martyr, not as a victim’ (pp. 90, 91).

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Tom Wright:

‘Turning to the gospels, we find all the puzzles of which readers have been aware for centuries (not simply with the rise of modern scholarship). The stories of Easter morning in Matthew 28, Mark 16, Luke 24, and John 20 are notoriously difficult to harmonize. We shall never be sure how many women went in what order to the tomb, at what point two or more male disciples went as well, how many angels they all saw, where or in what order the appearances of Jesus took place. But… it is precisely this imprecision, coupled with the breathless quality of the narratives, that gives them not only their unique flavour, but also their particular value. Despite the scorn of some, lawyers and judges have regularly declared that this is precisely the state of the evidence they find in a great many cases: this is what eyewitness testimony looks and sounds like. And in such cases *the surface discrepancies do not mean that nothing happened; rather, they mean that the witnesses have not been in collusion’* (emphasis Wright’s) (pp. 121-2).

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Marcus Borg:

The Centrality of Easter

‘Easter is utterly central to Christianity. “God raised Jesus from the dead” is the foundational affirmation of the New Testament. About this Tom and I agree. We also agree that the best explanation of the rise of Christianity – indeed the only adequate explanation – is the resurrection of Jesus. We also agree about its central meanings. Put most compactly, I see the meanings of Easter as twofold: Jesus lives and Jesus is Lord. Both claims are essential: Easter means that Jesus was experienced after his death, and that he is both Lord and Christ…’

Two pages later…

‘Resuscitation [means] a person dead or believed to be dead comes back to life again…

Resurrection in a first-century Jewish and Christian context is a very different notion… It means, not resumption of a previous existence but entry into a new kind of existence… Thus, whatever happened on Easter, is was not resuscitation…

‘I am very comfortable not knowing whether or not the tomb was empty… Paul does not say “And on the third day, they found the tomb empty”.’ (pp. 129, 131, 132).

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Tom Wright:

‘Proposing, as a historical statement, that the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth was empty because his body had been transformed into a new mode of physicality, will of course evoke howls of protest from those for whom the closed world of Enlightenment theory renders any such thing impossible from the start…

‘It is no good falling back on “science” as having disproved the possibility of resurrection. Any real scientist will tell you that science observes what normally happens; the Christian case is precisely that what happened to Jesus is not what normally happens.’ (p. 124).

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Marcus Borg:

‘Do I think Jesus thought of himself as divine? No. Do I think he had the mind of God – that is, did he know more than his contemporaries (and anybody who has ever lived) because, in addition to having a human mind, he had a divine mind? No. Do I think he had the power of God? That he could, for example, have called down twelve legions of angels to protect himself, as Matthew 26:53 reports he said? No. But if we make the distinction between the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter Jesus, then my answer would be “Yes, the post-Easter Jesus is a divine reality – is indeed one with God.” And about the pre-Easter Jesus, I would say, “He is the embodiment or incarnation of God”.’ (pp. 145-146).

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Tom Wright:

‘In the Exodus, the true God reveals himself as who he is, putting the idols to shame. But [according to Paul, this] God now is the God who ‘sends his son’ and then ‘sends the Spirit of the Son’ (Galatians 4:1-11). We have, within thirty years of Jesus’ death, what would later be called a very high Christology. It is very early and very Jewish.

‘Son of God’, in Paul’s day, came to be used by the early Christians [as a way] of saying that what had happened to Jesus was the unique and personal action of the one God of Israel. It became another way of speaking about the one God present, personal, active, saving, and rescuing, while still being able to speak of the one God sovereign, creating, sustaining, sending, remaining beyond.’ (p. 162).

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Marcus Borg:

‘If we make the distinction between the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter Jesus, [I would say] “Yes, the post-Easter Jesus is a divine reality – is indeed one with God”. And about the pre-Easter Jesus I would say, “He is the embodiment or incarnation of God”.’ (p. 146).

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Tom Wright:

‘Thinking and speaking of God and Jesus in the same breath are not, as often has been suggested, a category mistake…

But if you start with the God of the Exodus, of Isaiah, of creation and covenant, and of the psalms, and ask what that God might look like were he to become human, you will find that he might look very much like Jesus of Nazareth, and perhaps never more so than when he dies on a Roman cross…

The early church was not reticent about saying that Jesus was messiah, that his death was God’s saving act, and that he and his Father belonged together within the Jewish picture of one God’ (p. 167).

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Marcus Borg:

‘”Son of God” is perhaps the single most familiar christological title… It has a history in the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish tradition.

“Son of God” could refer to Israel, … [or] to the king of Israel… [or]

In the book of Job, angels or perhaps members of the divine council are referred to as sons of God… One further use of the metaphor in the Jewish tradition…: Near the time of Jesus, other Jewish Spirit persons were sometimes called “son” of God.’ (p. 151).

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Tom Wright:

‘As with most ancient history, of course, we cannot verify independently what is reported in only one source. If that gives grounds for ruling it out, however, most of ancient history goes with it…

‘Of course, legends surround the birth and childhood of many figures who afterward became important. As historians, we have no reason to say that this did not happen in the case of Jesus and some reasons to say that it did. But by comparison with other legends about other figures, Matthew and Luke look after all quite restrained.’ (pp. 174, 175).

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Marcus Borg:

‘Statements about Jesus being “the only way” [reflect] the joy of having found one’s salvation through Jesus, and the intensity of Christian devotion to Jesus. They should be understood as exclamations, not doctrines, and as “the poetry of devotion and the hyperbole of the heart.”

‘But the claim does mean that for us, as Christians, Jesus is the decisive revelation of God, and what a life full of God is like…

‘The New Testament itself contains an exceedingly compact christological crystallization: “Jesus is the image of the invisible God”. In him we see what God is like. The Greek word behind image is “icon”… An icon is a sacred image: its purpose is to mediate the sacred. Jesus as image and icon of God not only shows us what God is like but also mediates the sacred. The one who was and is the Word of God, Wisdom of God, and Son of God is also the sacrament of God.’ (p. 156).

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Tom Wright:

‘There is no pre-Christian Jewish tradition suggesting that the messiah would be born of a virgin. No one used Isaiah 7:14 this way before Matthew did. Even assuming Matthew or Luke regularly invented material to fit Jesus into earlier templates, why would they have invented something like this? The only conceivable parallels are pagan ones, and these fiercely Jewish stories have certainly not been modeled on them. Luke at least must have known that telling this story ran the risk of making Jesus out to be a pagan demigod. Why for the sake of an exalted metaphor would they take this risk – unless they at least believed them to be literally true?’ (p. 176).

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Marcus Borg:

‘Tom and I see the birth stories [of Jesus] quite differently… I do not think they are historically factual… but are profoundly true in another and more important sense… I do not think the virginal conception is historical, and I do not think there was a special star or wise men or shepherds or birth in a stable in Bethlehem. Thus I do not see these stories as historical reports but as literary creations… They are not history remembered but rather metaphorical narratives using ancient religious imagery to express central truths about Jesus’ significance’ (p. 179).

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Tom Wright:

‘I propose that what we call the second coming, which is actually a metonym for the larger picture which includes cosmic renewal, human resurrection, the royal presence of Jesus, and the sovereign rule of God, was a very early Christian development of Jewish apocalyptic eschatology, both necessitated and facilitated by the unexpected resurrection of the Messiah. What had been expected as a large-scale event at the end of time had happened as a small-scale, though explosive, event in the middle of time. The end had come, and the end was still to come… In this light we can make sense of the notorious 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, which, through the literalistic reading of its apocalyptic imagery, has spawned many a fanciful eschatological scheme among fundamentalists in particular.’ (pp. 202-203).

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More from Marcus Borg (from his chapter on Jesus’ birth-stories, including the ‘virgin birth’):

‘To say “What happened in Jesus was of the Spirit” is not a factual claim dependent upon a biological miracle, but a way of seeing Jesus [as] the decisive disclosure of God… The important questions are “Is Jesus the light of the world? Is he the true Lord? Is what happened to him ‘of God’?” Answering these questions affirmatively lays claim to our whole lives… Meister Eckhart, a Christian mystic, theologian, and preacher from the thirteenth century… spoke of the virgin birth as something that happens *within us*… [It’s] the story of Christ being born within us through the union of the Spirit of God with our flesh. Ultimately, the story of Jesus’ birth is not just about the past but about the internal birth in us in the present’ (pp. 186).

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Tom Wright:

‘Christian spirituality is focused on Jesus, the messiah of Israel… There is no split Christology in the New Testament, no Jesus of history played off against a Christ of faith. The scandal at the heart of the Christian faith is that Christians are committed to worshipping a first-century Jew, believing that in him the living God, the God of Israel, the creator of the world was and is personally present… Christian spirituality… classically meditates not simply on the Christ of faith but also on the Jesus of history, believing them to be one and the same person and discovering, through getting to know this person as living, active, present, loving, and grieving, that they are recognizing in him the human face of the one true God.’ (p. 210).

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Marcus Borg:

‘Truly I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Kingdom of God come with power’… ‘When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next; for truly I say to you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes’ (Mark 9:1, cf. Mark 1:15, which speaks of the nearness of the Kingdom; Matthew 10:23, cf. Mark 13:24-27)

[So] Jesus did not speak of his own second coming, but he did expect the immiment coming of the kingdom of God and the Son of Man. After his death, this expectation got transferred to the expectation of his immiment return as king of the kingdom that he had proclaimed.

Put most simply: Jesus expected the kingdom of God; the early church expected Jesus… The apocalyptic eschatology of early Christianity and the expectation of the second coming of Jesus emerge within the early Christian community after Easter.

This is my own position.’ (p. 193).

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Tom Wright:

[Marcus and I] stand shoulder to shoulder against all attempts to reduce the gospels to a set of theologically inspired fictions… My point remains that the genre of the gospels, and of the individual stories in which Jesus figures, lies along the continuum of history and biography, not of parable.’ (p. 216).

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Marcus Borg:

‘I do not myself think there will be a future visible return of Christ… I see the belief in an imminent and manifestly public return of Christ to be a mistaken belief of the early community… (and) I cannot imagine a future return of Jesus (or of Christ – I am using the words interchangeably here)… I can imagine the end of the world. I can imagine the final judgment. But I cannot imagine a return of Christ. If we try to imagine that, we have to imagine him returning to *some place*…. The Book of Revelation, despite its being mistaken about the end being near, makes the strong affirmation that Christ is Lord and Rome is not.’ (p. 195).

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Tom Wright:

‘[Our aim is] to get into the minds of our subjects… When we do so, the categories that Jesus’ own world offered to describe someone doing and saying the sorts of things Jesus was doing and saying were: prophet, messiah, martyr. Jesus could, and I have argued did believe that he, in filling these roles, was doing something for Israel that Israel could not do for itself, something that in its scriptures only its God, YHWH could and would do. If, as Marcus suggests, these roles make us nervous, with our late twentieth-century perceptions and prejudices, so be it. *Nervous*? They scare me stiff. Is that not precisely what we should expect if we come face-to-face with ultimate and deeply personal reality – that is, God? Ought we to expect to be able to appraise God coolly, neutrally, rationally? Would God be God if we could?’ (p. 226).

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Marcus Borg:

‘If we make the distinction between the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter Jesus, [I would say] “Yes, the post-Easter Jesus is a divine reality – is indeed one with God”. And about the pre-Easter Jesus I would say, “He is the embodiment or incarnation of God”.’ (p. 146).

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The final word from Tom Wright:

‘Once we focus both history and faith on Jesus of Nazareth… we may perhaps find that creation, sacraments, human life, politics, history, and faith come rushing together in new integrations for which as yet we have no language but worship. That, too, seems to me to possess the ring of truth.

‘What, after all, is the end of all this endeavour? Is it that we, as historians, theologians, cultural critics, or whatever, should analyze a question to our own satisfaction, provide an answer that neatly ties everything together, and go off shopping or playing golf, secure in a good little job well done? Is not a book about Jesus merely a step toward something far more important? Is not the ultimate aim that we should come face-to-face – and hope and pray to bring others face-to-face – with the one in whose face (wounded yet glorious) we see the face of the creator God, the covenant God, the one who loves us more than we can ever guess? Is it not that we should be transformed by that meeting, that gaze, so that we can share the same love with the world around? Books about Jesus can be an aid toward worship, a guide in mission. But if it really is Jesus we are talking about, worship and mission are more important even than books’ (pp. 227-8).

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Note 1: As I say earlier, these ‘bits’ from this important book were meant to provoke thought. I hope I’ve chosen representative samples of the thinking of these two scholars.

Note 2: Put Borg or N T Wright into the Google search of this website for many more articles by/about these two outstanding scholars.

For example: my review of Borg’s Heart of Christianity – http://jmm.org.au/articles/22422.htm

Tom Wright’s Simply Christian and The Last Word – http://jmm.org.au/articles/18913.htm

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Rowland Croucher

Updated/compiled from earlier articles available on this website – January 2, 2010